Dynamics CRM 2011: The “Wait or Build” Decision

How would you describe your feelings about an impending upgrade for an application you use a lot and depend on?

• A. a necessary evil
• B. more exciting than Christmas
• C. somewhere in between

Based on traffic and on the responses I’ve received since posting Taking the Covers off Dynamics CRM 2011, my guess is a lot of users and customizers of Dynamics CRM lean towards “B”. That’s not surprising to me: when you use an application as a solution platform, new features can have a huge impact, saving you hours of development time or allowing you to build solutions that simply weren’t possible with the previous version.

For the next few months, those of us who build on the CRM platform will have what I think of as the “wait or build” decision: If you need to do something that’s going to be significantly easier in CRM 2011, do you wait a few more months until you can get it (more or less) out of the box? Or do you swallow hard and build it now?

Based on what we can see in the video linked to in the article, here are a few of my recommendations for the “might wanna wait” category:

• Need dashboards, KPIs, visualization?  If you’re using CRM Online you’ve already got a sneak preview of what dashboards can look like in CRM. The problem with the current CRM Online implementation is that they’re implemented as “personalizations”: every individual user must configure his or her own dashboards, and there’s no way to centrally build and deploy dashboards for users. In my experience, the people with the skills to build dashboards are generally NOT the people who need dashboards, and vice versa. Up until now if you wanted BI in CRM you needed to build it yourself or buy an add-on. The add-on vendors will always find a way to add value…but they’re going to have to work a little harder starting with 2011, since it looks like we’ll have dashboards worthy of the name in the product.
• Find yourself coding around limitations in CRM Online? For me, this is a HUGE one: my production CRM is CRM Online. Overall, I love Microsoft’s cloud CRM. Only problem is, the architectural limitations around extending CRM Online generally means that I can’t do most of the really cool stuff I want to do: No plug-ins, no server-based ASP.NET applications, no custom SSRS reports, most add-ons don’t work with it. (Here’s an article where I discuss the issue…) The promise in 2011 is that we’ll finally get parity between the deployment options in terms of how we can extend the application. Like I said: HUGE.
• Want easy integration with SharePoint document libraries? If you never quite got all that IFRAME code figured out, you aren’t alone…and you don’t have long to wait for an out of the box solution. It looks like a nice baseline IFRAME-style integration will be included, where you’ll have the option of letting CRM create a document library for you – say, for an account record.
• Building CRM add-on apps? Assuming you can still find function gaps to fill, deploying your add-ons will get a lot easier than it is now, especially with 2011’s “managed solution” concept. This is going to be a significant shift in the way we develop and deploy solutions on the XRM platform, I think just as much for enterprise developers as for ISVs.
• Need an audit trail of changes to CRM records? Currently, there’s no record-level auditing built in to CRM. There are plenty of ways to build DIY auditing (for example, the approach I discussed in this article…), but starting in CRM 2011 it looks like we won’t have to resort to that approach any more, since auditing looks to be built right in.
• Need to measure salespeople’s performance against goals? It looks like this is going to be built in as well, which is good, since I don’t know anybody who ever quite figured out the mysterious connection between Fiscal Year Settings and sales quotas in CRMs 3 and 4.
• Jumping through hoops trying to implement security at the field level? Martin Jaeger reminded me I missed this one. True field-level security should be in CRM 2011, so this should be in the “wait” category. Thanks Martin!
• Need more than one form for an entity? I almost forgot this one. It’s a big one, though, so if you find yourself wrassling with code like the kind I discussed in this article…well, you might want to wait.   
• Need filtered lookups? Nathan Vanderhoof pointed out this one: “Depending on your skill level and the urgency of your users requirements might want to wait for Filtered Lookups as well.” Well said. Thanks Nathan!
• Recycling the “Fax” and “Letter” activities getting tiresome? As Jdz points out in his comment below, the ability to create true custom activities will open up some good possibilities. Obviously we have a lot to learn about how these will be implemented (will they synch to Outlook? will we be able to create 1:N relationships from activities to other entities?), but having them in the first place is a good start! 

Also, Andrew Wolfe raises a good point in his comment below: will some of these new features only be available in certain versions, a la the salesforce.com pricing model? My guess (a.k.a. “editorial opinion”) is that few if any of these features will be version dependent. That would be inconsistent with the traditional Dynamics CRM approach, and it would be very unpopular with the developer community Microsoft needs to fill up the Dynamics Marketplace with cool downloadable apps that take advantage of these sweet features.